Table Of ContentINVESTIGATIONS INTO THE ORIGIN OF
LANGUAGE AND CONSCIOUSNESS
BOSTON STUDIES IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF SCIENCE
EDITED BY ROBERT S. COHEN AND MARX W. WARTOFSKY
VOLUME 44
IRAN Due IHAO
INVESTIGATIONS
INTO THE
ORIGIN OF LANGUAGE
AND CONSCIOUSNESS
Translated by
Daniel J. Herman and Robert L. Armstrong
D. REIDEL PUBLISHING COMPANY
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication. Data
Tran, Duc Thao.
Investigations into the origin of language and conscioumess.
(Boston studies in the philosophy of science; v. 44)
Translation of: Recherches sur I'origine du Iangage et de 1a
conscience.
Includes index.
I. Language and languages- Origin. 2. Psycholinguistics.
I. Title. II. Series.
Q174.B67 voL 44 IPI161 SOls [401 '.91 83-17726
ISBN-l 3; 978-94-009·6238-5 c-ISAN-I 3: 978·94·009-6236-1
DOl: 10.1007/978·94-009·6236·1
Published by D. Reidel Publishing Company,
P.O. Box 17,3300 AA Dordrecht, Holland.
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In all other countries, sold and distributed
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P.O. Box 322, 3300 AH Dordrechl, Holland.
This edition of Tran Duc Thao's Recherches sur /'origine du kmgoge er de fa conscience
(Paris: Editions sociales, 1973) has been edited by Carolyn R. Fawcett and Robert
S. Cohen.
All Rights Reserved.
e 1984 by D. Reidel Publishing Company
and copyright holders as specified on appropriate pages within.
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T ABLE OF CONTENTS
EDITORIAL PREFACE vii
FIRST INVESTIGATION: THE INDICATIVE GESTURE
AS THE ORIGINAL FORM OF CONSCIOUSNESS
SECOND INVESTIGATION: SYNCRETIC LANGUAGE 31
Introduction 33
I. The Development of the Instrument 35
From Prehominid to Homo Habilis 35
From the Preparation of the Instrument to its Elaboration 38
The Genesis of Stone Working - The Kafi«In as the Second
Stage of Prehominid Development 41
From the Elaboration of the Instrument to its Production -
The Olduvian as the Final Stage of the Gestation Period 44
II. The Birth of Language 48
Introduction 48
The Developed Indicative Sign 49
The Beginning of Language in the Prehominids 55
The First Signs ofR epresentation 59
A. The beginnings of representation in the child 60
B. The origins of the sign of representation in prehominid
development 63
C. The composite indicative sign 70
D. The general formula of the representation of the absent
object 71
E. The sign of syncretic representation of the instrumental
furm 72
F. Deferred imitation as insistent syncretic sign of represen-
tation of the motion of the absent object 79
v
vi CONTENTS
The Functional Sentence 80
A. The elementary forms of the functional sentence 82
B. The beginnings of the functional sentence in phylogenesis 92
C. Developed types of the functional sentence 99
D. The disengagement of the form and the birth of the name 107
III. The Alveolus of the Dialectic of Knowledge 127
Introduction to Sentence Formation 127
THIRD INVESTIGATION: MARXISM AND PSYCHO
ANALYSIS - THE OR.IGINS OF THE OEDIPAL
CRISIS 145
I. The Origin of the Pre-Oedipal Stage 148
II. The Genesis of the Oedipal Crisis 150
III. The Biological Tragedy of Woman and the Birth of Homo
Faber 158
IV. The Sign of the Phallic Woman and Oedipal Semantics 169
V. The Castration Symbol and the Female Oedipus 175
VI. From the Neanderthal 'Oedipus' to the Infantile Oedipus 190
NOTES 199
INDEX OF NAMES 213
EDITORIAL PREFACE
Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso
pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a
question: "One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of
consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings. Precisely where
must one draw the line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and
the conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he cites
Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect' from Capital:
... what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect
raises his structure in the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every
labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at
its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I, p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling)
Thao follows this immediately with a second question: "But is this the most
elementary form of consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the
origins of consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre
supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental awareness, of
actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness emerges first with the
activity of production using tools, and if the production of tools itself pre
supposes representation - that is, with an image of what is to be produced in
the mind of the producer - then the conditions for the origins of human
consciousness already presuppose the very form of consciousness which they
are supposed to explain.
It was reasoning of this sort that led Hegel to develop a theory of the mind
which made consciousness itself the presupposition, the very originating
condition, for production, indeed for the existence and the coming-into-being
of the objects of consciousness. These objects, or perhaps better said, these
objectifications, become the means by which consciousness then becomes
aware of itself, as self-consciousness. But if this Hegelian primacy of con
sciousness is plainly an idealist solution to the problem, what would the
alternative materialist solution be? Indeed, if we take Marx at his word here,
then he would appear to propose idealist presuppositions for the explanation
of the elementary forms of consciousness, and this would then seem to be
in stark contradiction to the materialist, praxis-oriented account which Marx
and Engels have developed in their historical materialism.
vii
viii EDITORIAL PREFACE
There is, however, another way to ask the question, and it is in fact com
patible with the historical materialist account: deny that the architect, in
contrast to the bee, represents the most elementary form of consciousness,
and then propose that representation, as the essential precondition of human
consciousness, itself has its genesis, which is to be found in still more
elementary forms of pre-representational consciousness, which exists prior
to the fully human forms of production, and prior to the making and use of
tools. This is the path taken by Tran Duc Thao in this incisive and imaginative
study. He turns, as we see, to the pre-hominid development oflanguage, to that
crucial (and dramatic) moment which is, in his account, the act of signifying
an object, i.e., the development of the primitive linguistic sign. He begins,
therefore, in the First Investigation, with his analysis of the indicative gesture.
With that, we are launched into one of the most sophisticated and
anthropologically informed treatments of the origins of language and of
consciousness, set forth within a broadly Marxist framework. Tran Duc Thao
proceeds from the indicative gesture, which is of course at once the elementary
linguistic sign, to the development of self-recognition and to the possibilities
of self-reference on the basis of reciprocal recognition of the other, and then
to the forms of 'echoic representation' - his interpretation of the classical
dialectic of self-consciousness within the terms of pre-hominid and early
hominid praxis and social interaction. He pursues the stages of this dialectic
from what he neatly characterizes as 'sporadic cognizance' to collective
cognizance, and thence to individual cognizance, in a way reminiscent of both
Vygotsky's and Wallon's theories of cognitive development in the child; and
then he traces the praxical origins of the 'ideality of consciousness'.
In the Second Investigation, Tnin Duc Thao develops his theory of signif
ication, the crucial relation of meaning to instrumental activity, and explores
the progress from the indicative sign to genuine representation. "The qualitat
ive leap" he writes "is realized only with the transcendence of the present
perception through the beginning of representation" (p. 59). In a detailed
analysis, combined with a close discussion of the work of Piaget and that of
Gvosdev, he traces the beginnings of representation in the child; and we see
thereby the development of the representational sign and the functional
sentence, in both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic context. Throughout
this impressi~e analysis of the development of language and meaning, Tran
Duc Thao embeds it within an account of the forms of praxis in which such
a linguistic development might plausibly have taken place: in the transition
from the production of the 'instrument' to the production of the 'tool' as
such, from Homo habilis to Homo faber.
EDITORIAL PREF ACE ix
With his Third Investigation, a striking essay on 'Marxism and Psycho
analysis on the Origins of the Oedipal Crisis', Thao again proceeds with a
socio-historical reconstruction of the genesis of the Oedipal. Here, as we see,
he questions Freud's Oedipal theory, not indeed in the post-structuralist way
of Deleuze and Guattari in their Anti-Oedipe, but rather in terms of a histor
ical materialist critique and reconstruction of the hypothetical origins of
Oedipality in a pre-Oedipal stage. He traces this to the social, rather than
biological, development of the transition from what may be called animal
'jealousy' to the suppression of this 'zoological individualism' as a condition
for the formation of the first social group necessary for the beginning of
human production; and the further drama of human history follows, the
'reawakening of jealousy' and the emergence of the Oedipus Complex as a
later stage, developing along with the transition from the communalization
of women to the pairing family.
In all of these 'Investigations', Tnln Duc Thao weaves a rich and complex
argument from the strands of anthropology, lingUistics, archeology, cognitive
and developinental psychology and epistemology. He has, of course, his
profound familiarity with the thought of Marx and Engels, Hegel, and an
impressive list of contemporary thinkers, European, American and Soviet.
Thao moves, often magisterially, sometimes daringly and riskily, among these
fields, with a striking suppleness of mind and with great originality. He has
written a work which should stimulate a new and deeper approach to the
origins of human consciousness, the origins of all of us.
*
Tran Duc Thao is author of the seminal series of studies of Husserl and Marx
which were published in the 40s and 50s, and which have been gathered into
his modern classic, the Phenomenologie et materialisme dialectique (Editions
Minh-tan, Paris 1951; soon to appear in a fine English translation by Daniel
J. Herman and Donald V. Morano within our Boston Studies). The present
work, written in the 60s and early 70s, and published in Paris in 1973 by
Editions sociales, continues and modifies the account of the origin of con
sciousness given in the essay on dialectical materialism in the earlier book.
Whether a phenomenological mode of analysis is thoroughly replaced in the
book before us, or perhaps is aufgehoben by a socially articulated, which is
to say by a historical materialist, analysis, or whether there are still phenom
enological and also biological elements, will be debated by Tran Duc Thao's
attentive readers. To say with Marx, once again, that "language is practical
x EDITORIAL PREFACE
consciousness" is also to welcome Thao's instructive exploration of a social
and evolutionary theory of what is latent as well as manifest in human nature.
*
We are most grateful for the exemplary achievement of Professor Daniel J.
Herman and Dr. Robert L. Armstrong in their translation of the Recherches
sur I 'origine du langage et de la conscience.
We are also pleased that circumstances have enabled us at last to present
the pioneering work of this distinguished philosopher from Viet Nam to the
English-reading scientific public in our own country and world-wide.
Center for Philosophy and History of Science, ROBERT S. COHEN
Boston University
Department ofP hilosophy, MARX W. WARTOFSKY
Baruch College of the City Un(versity of New York
